Book of the Week: "The Accidental Billionaires" by Ben Mezrich

Finally had an opportunity to pick up the book "The Accidental Billionaires" - you know the book the movie The Social Network was based on.

The movie took a lot of liberty from the book that made Mark Zuckerberg seem really evil. He blogged his whole creation of Facemash and "stole" digitized images, but it wasn't over a girlfriend dumping him. Secondly, no Zuckerberg and his roommates did not write algorithms on windows. I'm pretty sure the University frowns upon it and really would you really expect that from Harvard students? I'm thinking that's something you'd see on an MIT dorm window just blocks down Mass Ave.

Lastly, one the final scenes in the movie was Eduardo confronting Mark telling him he was going to sue Mark and Facebook, by saying "lawyer up." Sure nice cinematic that makes for an intriguing movie, but it didn't happen.

(On a side note, despite the lawsuit, according to a 2012 article in Forbes Saverin says there are  no hard feelings between the two of them.)

We can take a lot from this book - how Zuckerberg is an exceptionally talented computer programmer, Eduardo made $3,000 dollars in a summer because of an interest in the weather, or the Winklevoss Twins being incredibly entitled. But no, despite all those being true, those are not the points I'm trying to make.

The main point we can take from this book is, it's about the people who you choose to side yourselves with. Sure, the Winklevoss Twins were already talking about the idea about creating an online social network, but neither one of them nor their friend, Divya Narenda, were programmers. That's why they approached Zuckerberg.

But Zuckerberg didn't want to work with the Winklevoss Twins. He liked the idea of an exclusive social networking site and approached his friend, Eduardo Saverin.

Unless he intentionally used the same code on HarvardConnection to create Facebook, Zuckerberg stole nothing. (I'm pretty sure a guy like Mark, who was admitted to Harvard, is smart enough to know that.) Mark wanted to work with his buddy, Eduardo, on the project.

It was mentioned in the first few pages, despite Eduardo's (who was Mezrich's main consultant) vastly different personality than Mark, there was something about him that Eduardo liked.

We all have our reasons for choosing our friends and who we want to surround ourselves with. Eduardo a choose Mark to be his friend and Mark choose Eduardo to start this business. There's nothing wrong that. Steve Jobs wanted to work with Wozniak and Bill Gates with Paul Allen.

We chose who we want to be around.